I am compelled to keep blogging in this space – even more so than on my other, “real-life” blog – because the wait for GTA4 is turning into an all-consuming hunger. I’ve already taken time off from work for it (even though I have a legitimate and necessary reason for doing so that has nothing at all to do with it), and every time my RSS reader dings, I become inexplicably giddy at the thought of getting new GTA4-related information.

And so today I’m trying to figure out what other soon-to-be-released games I can recall getting this bent out of shape over. This list isn’t necessarily reflective of my all-time favorite games (although certainly most of these would make the list); this is simply a list of the games that I absolutely could not wait for any longer.

1. On the 360, there’s been a lot of big titles to get excited for – and believe me, I’ve been foaming at the mouth for most of them, especially Mass Effect – but I guess I’d have to put Oblivion at the top of my list, which was a surprise to me even while it was happening:

I’m not even sure I myself knew how much I was looking forward to Oblivion; certainly I got really caught up in the hype over the last few months; I pre-ordered the Collector’s Edition, I sucked up every available preview and direct-feed morsel I could find; I even watched some of Gamespot’s 12-hour playtest, which I had originally dismissed as being the most retarded idea I’d ever heard. Here’s the funny part – I bought Morrowind – twice, for both PC and Xbox – but while I really appreciated the concept, I never got further than reaching the first quest-related town of Balmora before I lost interest. Between the two platforms I probably put in a total of 8 hours. Why, then, was Oblivion such a coveted purchase? Why was I so deeply enamored with a sequel to a game I’d hardly put any effort into? Was I a sucker for PR? I don’t even own an HDTV, so it’s not like my inner graphics-whore/crack-addict was going to receive that sort of gratification…

2. On the Xbox, I was tempted to say it’s the GTA Double Pack and/or Fable (I was also excited for KOTOR, but not to the same extent, even if its become one of my all-time favorites), but I think it has to be Psychonauts, which had been first announced in 2002 and was one of my primary reasons for buying an Xbox in the first place (along with the Oddworld games, which, sadly, weren’t all they could have been). That Psychonauts managed to still be awesome under the weight of years of expectations is a remarkable achievement, even if the Meat Circus ended up driving me (and many others) totally batshit insane.

3. On the PC… well, to be honest, it’s been quite a long time since my PC was my primary gaming center, and I can’t recall being amped up for a game that I knew I was only going to be playing on my PC. I did get excited for Neverwinter Nights, I guess, but that wasn’t an all-encompassing hunger. And I’m not afraid to admit that I’ve been looking forward forDuke Nukem Forever for, well, forever – and when they finally get around to releasing DukeNukem 3D for XBLA, I will DEFINITELY be going crazy for it.

After that… well, I’m not sure. When I was a little kid with an Atari 2600, I really can’t recall getting excited about new releases, because (a) there was no internet, (b) since my parents bought the games for me, I had no choice in the matter as to what to get excited about. If anything, I would get excited to get games that other friends of mine already had. Same thing with my brother’s Sega Genesis, which I never bought games for, either. But by the same token, we could play all those old games OVER and OVER and OVER again – we didn’t necessarily need anything new when we could keep having fun with what we already had. (Boy, I miss those days!)

>GTAIV by far is my most anticipated game of all time. GTA3 came out of left field so there really wasn’t any room to get excited about it, and Vice city/San Andreas (plus the stories) were all really the same game in a different setting so the hype train on that wasn’t as big as it could have been.Another 8 days…blarg…